Friday, April 8, 2011

Well it happened again, the Hard Drive my computer crashed, sigh. The only good news is that Hard Drive isn't gone only unusable as a drive. Thanks to TestDisk again I am able to pull off any data that I haven't backed up. The thing that irks me about Test Disk is that it uses the current date on the copied files. I also recommend the Universal Boot Disk, it is a linux distro on a CD and has a complete suite of diagnostic, disk management and disk recovery. The Linux OS and tools have a come a long way in the past five years. While novices would be lost, people who have some knowledge of their computer will find the tools useful.

The other good news is that I will be able to turn this in for Warranty repair, and when I get it back I will have two hard drives on my system of equal capacity. I use a USB Hard Drive for backup of my writing and software development. As part of my backup routine I save my writing folder after a major project is finished. Since I just finished Blackmarsh my last backup of my writing was only a day old.

But my hometown computer stores did not have a 1 TB Hard Drive in stock anywhere so it is off to Erie today to pick one up. With luck I will be able to do some work on Scourge on Sunday, and be able to run Monday's game using Fantasy Grounds and Skype.

Bat in the Attic Games

How to make a Sandbox

The Old School Renaissance

To me the Old School Renaissance is not about playing a particular set of rules in a particular way, the dungeon crawl. It is about going back to the roots of our hobby and seeing what we could do differently. What avenues were not explored because of the commercial and personal interests of the game designers of the time.

What are RPGs?

A game where the players play individual characters interacting with a setting with their actions adjudicated by a human referee.

Rules are an aide to help the referee adjudicate actions and to help the players interact with the setting.

Dice are used to inject uncertainty which make a tabletop RPG campaign more interesting than "Let's Pretend".

The only thing a player needs to do to roleplay a character is to act if he or she was really there in the setting in that situation.